The ongoing public debate about the Snowden NSA leaks and government surveillance was effectively settled once and for all today, as former News of The World editor Andy Coulson informed the world how he would have acted had Edward Snowden approached him – rather than The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald – with his cache of classified security documents.
The Guardian reports:
The former NoW editor Andy Coulson said he would have rejected the Edward Snowden story if it had been offered to him when he was editing the newspaper, the Old Bailey has heard.
Coulson told the phone hacking trial on Tuesday he felt the news story about US National Security Agency surveillance, based upon a cache of documents leaked by the whistleblower Snowden, would have endangered lives.
Andy Coulson – known by many of his peers as the Saint of Fleet Street – distinguished himself throughout his career by his unimpeachable journalistic ethics, frequently declining to run lucrative stories picked up by other newspapers because he could not be absolutely certain that the information had been gleaned from reputable sources or that its publication would serve the public interest.
Showing the steady, high-handed professional judgement which was the hallmark of his tenure as editor of the News of the World, The Guardian reports Coulson as saying:
“It’s a topical example, Edward Snowden. If they came to me at the News of the World, I think I would have turned them down,” he said, adding that the story on sweeping surveillance by the US government had “a potential for lives to be put at risk”.
The fact that Andy Coulson decided to weigh in on this contentious issue can only add further weight and moral credibility to the government’s argument that it has the unlimited right to take any action in the name of national security without either informing or seeking the consent of the public.
Coulson’s intervention is also a tremendous setback for The Guardian and The Washington Post newspapers, who only yesterday were boasting about their newly-won Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the Edward Snowden NSA leaks. Indeed, the judgement and reputation of the entire Pulitzer Prize committee must surely now be called into question for conferring an award on two newspapers who so egregiously violated what is already becoming known as the ‘Coulson Doctrine’ of fastidiously weighing the public interest before publishing sensational material.
Coulson could not be reached for further comment as he is currently standing trial at the Old Bailey on charges of phone hacking and committing perjury, absurd and hurtful accusations that were probably concocted by jealous rivals who can never live up to Coulson’s exemplary standards of professional and moral conduct.
Semi-Partisan Politics 